Digital Textbooks for Digital Natives

Those 30-pound backpacks—filled with textbooks that weigh down schoolchildren nationwide—may soon become a thing of the past.

Increasingly, educators are adopting digital textbooks, truly interactive online manuals that can be updated almost as quickly as new research appears. “Our students have grown up using the Internet all their lives,” says Della Curtis, coordinator of the Office of Library Information Services for the Baltimore County (MD) Public Schools. “[Students] desire learning resources that are interactive,” she says, “and with this new trend of designing structural units within multimedia online files, I think this could put traditional textbooks out of date.”

Curtis recently participated in a think tank sponsored by textbook publisher Follett to discuss trends in digital learning tools. While Follett Digital Resource’s COO, Michael Johnson, stands firmly behind his company’s print business, he does admit that Follett has eagerly embraced digital texts, producing ebooks for K–12 media centers and digital textbooks for higher education. “We have evidence that textbooks are declining,” he says. “But we do not have digital textbooks in K–12 at this point.”

Curtis, however, says that it’s just a matter of time before digital materials—and streamlined backpacks—become more prevalent in schools. “The hitch is the accessibility of kids to laptop computers,” says Curtis. “There’s an economic impact. However, the cost of laptops is decreasing rapidly, so that will become less of a problem.”

In fact, digital learning tools are often far less expensive than their print counterparts, says Curtis, as she discovered firsthand after spending less than $100,000 to purchase an entire online reference library for 51 district schools, which she says would have cost $653,000 in print form. “This is going to be the tool of choice for digital natives, for today’s kids,” she says. “We’ve always scoffed at the idea of reading the chapter, and answering the questions at the end of the book. How exciting is that?”